LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced two new curatorial appointments—Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art, and Leah Lehmbeck, Department Head of European Painting & Sculpture and American Art.

Rita Gonzalez has been at LACMA since 2006 and has served as Interim Department Head since 2016. Gonzalez is known in the field for her groundbreaking exhibitions addressing topics in contemporary Latinx and Latin-American art, including Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (2008), Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (2011), and, more recently, with José Luis Blondet and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, A Universal History of Infamy (2018). Gonzalez has also worked on a number of exhibitions at the intersection of art and film, including Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film (2014), Agnès Varda in Californialand (2014), and the upcoming In Production: Art and the Studio System. She has made significant additions to LACMA’s collections of contemporary art, most notably spearheading LACMA’s 50th Anniversary Artist Gifts Initiative, which culminated in the exhibition L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists (2017).

Leah Lehmbeck joined LACMA in 2014 and has served as Acting Department Head since 2017. In her time at LACMA, Lehmbeck organized Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins at Missolonghi (2014) and To Rome and Back: Individualism and Authority in Art, 1500–1800 (2018). She also authored Impressionist and Modern Art: The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection (2016) and has served as general editor for the forthcoming three-volume publication celebrating The Ahmanson Foundation’s gifts to LACMA (2019). Lehmbeck represents the curatorial team in planning discussions for the museum’s building for the permanent collection, and has led efforts to secure display solutions for LACMA’s sculpture collections around Los Angeles County during our closure.